After giving us a hilarious and touching queer/fantasy/quest/romance in Walk Between Worlds, Samara Breger has turned her attention to a romantic fantasy of a more gothic nature. Specifically, a queer vampire romance.
In A Long Time Dead, Poppy Cavendish awakens one night to discover she’s become a vampire. On the plus side, she feels an immediate interest in her vampiric companion, Roisin. On the minus side, she misses London, taverns, her friends back at the bawdy house she worked in, a couple of her clients, and, most of all, FOOD. Oh, and Roisin keeps insisting that she and Poppy are just friends. Insisting a little too insistently.
What follows is a love story that spans decades, introduces us to a vast array of vampires and familiars, and asks deep questions about love and faith and loyalty and time while still being pure joy to read. I was lucky enough to speak with Breger about her new book, a few of her favorite bloodsuckers, and which Buffy characters actually deserved immortality.
Leah Schnellbach: Long Time Dead spans decades—it’s the story of a vampire love that transcends time and continents. I believe you’ve said this book came out of a challenge with two other authors, and started life as a novella?
Samara Breger: Yeah, it wasn’t so much a challenge, like a gauntlet—it was more like “Hey, we’re writing vampire novellas and it would be cool if you also did that and then we could pitch them to the publisher as a trio and we could put them out!” and I was like, “That should be fine, I can do that.”
LS: As an anthology?
SB: Yeah, as an anthology. I wrote one, and then one of the other authors, Anna Burke, said, “Hmm mine is a novel… Could yours be a novel?” And then from that point I got really carried away. It’s a much thicker book than I thought it was going to be! I have a really fantastic editor named Kit Haggard. I gave her what I had, and I also wrote a lot about: This is the vibe I want, this is what I’m going for, this is what I’m hoping it conveys, and she was like, “It does do that, but it does it, perhaps, too efficiently. How would you feel about expanding?” And I was like, “You know what? You’ve given me permission, I’m going to take off running. I added B plots, and more… pining. More time apart for [Poppy and Roisin] to pine for each other.
[laughter]
LS: I loved that in Walk Between Worlds , you worked in a lot of political commentary, and this one is about abuse and trauma, and about a bad domestic relationship. But you have it threaded through the whole book—people realistically dealing with how long it takes to get through that.
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A Long Time Dead
SB: A really helpful text for me was [Carmen Maria Machado’s] In the Dreamhouse, the story of slowly chipping away at a life, making it smaller and smaller until you don’t realize how close the walls are around you. Especially in contextualizing domestic abuse in queer relationships, and those funky power dynamics.
LS: Exactly, you deal with how it affects the whole found family, and how Poppy is like “We can just fix this!” and just charges ahead.
SB: It’s never as simple as that. But, in the end, it has to come down to Roisin and Cane.
LS: I thought that was a fun way to deal with trauma…?
SB: Thanks! [laughter] I’ve got my anti-colonialist book, and now my trauma book. What’s next?
LS: You mention Carmen Maria Machado [who worked on a special edition of Carmilla for Lanternfish Press]. What would you say are your top 5 vampiric books?
SB: Carmilla is gonna be a big one. Dracula, obviously, especially writing this book while Dracula Daily was happening—I love Dracula Daily, I think it’s such a great idea, everything that happens to the people who made it is great and good. Good for them!—and being reminded of, and seeing, how funny Dracula is. Being reminded of how good Dracula as a character is, and seeing these close reads on Mina and Lucy and the absolutely ludicrous nature of Lucy’s three boyfriends? That book is kind of a kitchen sink book. There’s so much going on. I’ve always been a Renfeld obsessive—I haven’t seen the movie yet because I’m terrified—I just love Renfield! But being reminded that gothics are silly.
So that’s Dracula, Carmilla…
LS: You’ve got three left!
SB: I hate to say Twilight—
LS: I was going to ask about that because I remember you saying that you read it during the pandemic?
SB: I read every Twilight book except for the short sad one. There’s a lot of Twilight books—or not a lot, there’s just more than you would think. There’s the main books; the first one, but from Edward’s perspective—that’s Midnight Sun; there’s the first one gender-swapped (my favorite one) Twilight: Life and Death; there’s the sad one about a girl who dies. But I think what I enjoy about that book, it’s from an extremely… I am Jewish. The Twilight books are deeply, deeply the opposite of Jewish writing. It feels like we’re dealing with right and wrong and virginity and angels who walk among us. But. What Stephenie Meyer did was say: “Fuck you, I don’t like this—I don’t like that [vampires] can’t go in the sun! For me, they sparkle.”
But I think what she also did was, I don’t think she realized what a scary book she wrote. At one point, Edward does a c-section on Bella with his teeth! You’ve got a lot of beheadings, you’ve got Bella slicing her own arm to distract a hungry vampire, like there’s a lot of stuff in Twilight that is compelling, especially juxtaposed against this sparkly narc vampire who has like, a very nice car—and she dedicates a lot of pages to his very nice car. So I love that.
I love, um, the Dracula musical in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
LS: I feel like that one gets forgotten in the lore.
SB: I’ve read a lot of vampire books but all that’s coming to me is puppets. I like my vampires goofy. But also like… did you ever see The Vampire Lovers?
LS: No, I don’t think so.
SB: It’s a late ‘60s/early ‘70s. It’s sort of a retelling of Carmilla? What really got me at first was that they have period appropriate costumes… kinda. So like, Victorian-style hair, but with ‘70’s style curtain bangs. It’s really—it’s a Hammer Horror, there’s a lot of boobies. Ingrid Pitt, who plays the Carmilla figure, I’m a little obsessed with her. She is a Holocaust survivor, and she has an accent, and it’s very much like the “Foreign”, “Eastern”, sexy, outsider—who’s often anti-Semitic allegory. And here’s this Jew, just being there. I adore this movie. It’s extremely cheesy, it’s really wonderful, I recommend it. I also really love Dracula’s Daughter—
LS: That’s another Hammer, right?
SB: No, that’s earlier. It’s a direct sequel to the MGM Dracula. [ed note: I was thinking of Dracula A.D. 1972, which I recommend] She’s this creepy lesbian, and she’s luring pretty blonde women into her lair with the help of her faithful familiar. I’m really drawn to the creepy lesbian vampire.
LS: How did you decide, as you built the world of the vampires, what the rules were going to be and which rules you were chucking? Did you have a list of what the vampires could and couldn’t do?
SB: I didn’t have a Vampire Master Doc, but I wanted it to be disgusting. I wanted them to be really bloody. Often when you see like a sexy little vampire they just have, a little blood, around their mouth. I wanted blood everywhere. I wanted blood coming out of their eyes and their noses and their ears. I wanted them drooling blood. That was the biggest decision I made that isn’t necessarily vampire canon, that when they are thirsty for human blood, and they don’t have a resistance built up, all of the animal blood they may have consumed leaks out to make room for the human blood. Hopefully it’s as disgusting as I intended it to be.
LS: All the opening chapters, when Roisin is trying to teach Poppy not to be overcome—it’s so visceral, how much she wants to feed. You put so much weight on this sort of long training montage.
SB: I listen to that song a lot—“Training Montage” by the Mountain Goats.
LS: I’ll list that as one of the vampiric influences: John Darnielle.
SB: John Darnielle, a very well-known vampire. But most of the book was that. Most of the book was them in the house. And then it cut to them meeting again. And one of the things Kit said to me was, “No, Poppy needs to have growth on her own, and she needs to do other shit.” And what’s fun is, reading reviews, some people will say “I can tell this started as a novella, because in the middle part a lot happens,” but I feel like that was the first part that got written.
LS: I know it’s a novella because you told me it was going to be a novella. It feels to me like you’ve written a novel that focuses on slightly different angles of vampiric life, or un-life, or whatever.
SB: Yeah! It wasn’t my goal when I was writing to be like “I want this to be a different vampire book than what I’ve seen.” There are so many interesting vampire books out now, like A Dowry of Blood, and I wasn’t saying “This is a new take on vampires”, because vampires have been around forever. Lesbian vampires have been around, like [laughter] it’s a trope! I wanted to have fun, and I wanted to write a gothic. The characters in the book read The Monk, which I think is underappreciated.
LS: I have actually not read it, and reading A Long Time Dead made me want to read it.
SB: It’s so fucked up! Absolutely anything that can happen, does happen. I remember reading it and being like “This is dumb, this is dumb, this is dumb” and then I got to a point of like—“Oh, I’m terrified. This is genuinely scary.” It’s one of those books where you read it and think the author had fun. That’s what I appreciate about gothic in general. Frankenstein is a huge love of mine—the sympathy that you have for this creature, the brutality of the world around him, the kindness that he learns, this extremely painful discovery that he is not like everybody else. I wanted to write a gothic that had a lot of people’s internal worlds in it.
LS: Can you just talk, for a while, about Carmen—
SB: I knew you were gonna say that!
LS: —and how AWESOME she is?
SB: I wanted an adult in this book. Poppy and Roisin, they’re grown-ups, I guess… but Roisin is very old but also very stunted. When such a big trauma happens to you, you kind of get stuck at the age when it happened, and it’s a lot of work to move past that, and leave that safe small self behind. And Poppy? Is fucking 20. I knew that I needed a grown-up in the book. And I didn’t want to create a caretaker type of person, but I wanted someone who could contextualize, and say “You don’t have to live this extremely fraught existence, you don’t have to make these big extreme decisions. You can actually enjoy your life. Look at how I’ve built this family, and created this life for myself in a deeply ethical way.” And as I was writing it, I was like, “Ohhh she’s Catholic.” [laughter]
LS: And that was the next question. This is the best Catholic vampire representation since Anne Rice, I think.
SB: Please don’t get mad at me, Catholics! But Catholicism and vampirism really go together.
LS: They do! Look, they did it to themselves.
SB: Yeah, the Blood of Christ, I love reliquaries… but like, who keeps body parts except for vampires and Catholics? It just rolled together, and then Carmen being Spanish—I really wanted to make sure this ancient vampire cared about the world. And it’s hard to come up with a reason why someone who had lived for so long would have a real stake in—
LS: No pun intended…
SB: —in humanity being essentially good, and leaving things better than they found them. And for me it was like: “OK, she has religion, but also she has a great deal of guilt. One Easter egg that no one has found yet… it’s a spoiler for The Monk.
[SPOILER WARNING FOR THE MONK, A 227-YEAR-OLD GOTHIC NOVEL]
SB: The sin of the Monk, when you realize he’s going to Hell, it’s because his final sin, the unforgivable sin, is despair. And Carmen is fighting off despair. That’s her choice, that’s her “why.” And that’s my connection to The Monk, I’m realizing now, just for me.
LS: Having not read The Monk that did jump out at me. There’s a lot of thought that Carmen’s putting into why she’s trying to create all of this—trying to be a joyful vampire.
SB: Yeah. Especially because she had this mother who looms really large in her memory: Her mother wanted her to be a good Catholic woman. And she’s going to try.
LS: “I’m going to do my best, in my own vampiric way.” I also loved that the found family is—they realistically fight, it’s not like a perfect thing, and then also there’s orgies.
SB: I have so much backstory for each of these characters choosing what to keep in and what to not keep in and what to potentially revisit—they’ve all got stories.
LS: How did you tackle the research for this book? As it is, it spans a huge amount of the 19th century, and then if there’s more stories beyond that of them being older.
SB: In the original novella version, it went longer, and Valentin and Poppy were rumrunners in prohibition times.
LS: [chanting] “Sequel! Sequel!”
SB: I read a lot of romance novels that were set in that time. KJ Charles is an author who I really trust with historical accuracy. I read so much of her work. A lot of it was just going back and checking again and checking a third time, and finding out the smaller things like figuring out how food preservation happened, what gun someone might have, and where someone might have learned to use a sword. The easiest thing was the clothing, because there’s this really, really wonderful resource, FIT Fashion History Timeline. It’s remarkable how detailed it is. And it was such a blast being like, “OK but what are they wearing.”
Especially because if you have female characters wearing female clothes, it becomes: “How many layers of underpants can one person have?” And that’s why, since they have vampire strength, they’re just gonna rip the clothes off. Otherwise that is so many fucking layers.
LS: There are a lot of love scenes in the book! And if they had to get all the various pantaloons off in order—
SB: It would be 100 pages longer if we’re going pantaloon by pantaloon.
LS: I mean, I get it was colder, but still.
SB: They also had this fun thing called split-crotch trousers. I was gonna go for that, but then I was like: “…and then the petticoats” [makes sweeping petticoat-throwing motions]. But yeah, it makes it easier to pee.
LS: Maybe they’ll make a comeback once people are fully sick of wearing jumpsuits. The latest generation to admit that the jumpsuit does not work. But now! “Drink, Turn, Behead”: Edward Cullen, Spike, Carmilla?
SB: OK, so Edward is getting beheaded. Just because he is NOT FUN. If you want to wait to be married to have sex, that’s great, but I don’t know if I necessarily believe in vampire marriage? I don’t know if I believe in vampire monogamy. Whatever. I mean, I’m gonna turn Carmilla. That’s like spending eternity with her, and I want to spend eternity with Carmilla. But I’m gonna drink from Spike. I’m gonna have some fun with Spike. I always liked him better than Angel.
LS: Well, yeah.
SB: A slightly mean British man, there’s so much to love about him!
LS: Justice for Spike!
SB: He and Buffy had way better banter.
LS: Way more chemistry!
SB: Behead Zander.
LS: Yes.
SB: If anyone from that show is my soulmate, it’s Giles.
LS: See that’s—I’ve rewritten Buffy in my head many times. He should’ve just become a good vampire.
SB: If anyone deserves time to live forever!
LS: Then he’d have time to read everything.
SB: He’d be rebuilding the Library of Alexandria.
LS: I have a couple more serious things that might not actually be questions.
SB: OK!
LS: I really liked the way that you have Roisin fully realize what Cane has taken away from her when Poppy uses an Irish Gaelic word, and it knocks Roisin into a fugue state. Did you sort of encode that idea, that language would be the trigger of having had your culture taken away from you?
SB: That is part of Irish history, and it was not incidental to me that she was Irish. Not just for the Catholic thing, but just for the fun anti-colonialist themes that I enjoy bringing into my work. [laughter] Her language was always going to be the trigger, and her re-learning it was always going to be part of her progress. And the stuff about the parrot, and the parrot analogy—my dad has parrots and I’ve seen this happen, where they practice in private.
LS: That’s what I was thinking—an allegorical take on Ireland being—temporarily!—destroyed by the British, before it rose again. I also love that you have the clash of the sort of repressed “Don’t mind me, sorry for existing” Irish Catholicism versus Carmen’s very Spanish and “Get out of my way!” Catholicism.
SB: “I’m going to take care you. Do you understand?”—it’s very much that. Speaking of colonialism, or Catholic violence, I really didn’t want her to be sort of Crusade-y—she has a love for Catherine of Aragon, but she doesn’t have a love for Isabella. And not for Mary, either. I had some idea that she saw the Church of England as a little bit of a tragedy, but nothing that violence would rectify. I have some wonderful Catholic friends, with wonderful Catholic families, and for the last few times I’ve visited, I’ve been taking notes.
LS: My other bigger question: This book is largely about change, whether change is possible, external versus internal change. Because the whole cliché with vampires is that your set—like the Claudia thing in Interview with the Vampire.
SB: I really enjoy how they’re portraying her on the new series!
LS: I’ve still only seen the pilot.
SB: I’m really impressed with it. I of course, love the book—I have my problems with it, but I love it, and I love the movie, but this is the best… I’m amazed by what they did with it. But yeah, the theme of change! I also think part of my inspiration for this book was turning 30, and like, being me, but being me older. And also having a body that—I’ve been a weightlifter for a lot of years just for funsies, and I competed once, and I don’t do it as much as I used to, and I’m not as strong as I used to be. And that’s partially my fault, but that’s also partially… my priorities are shifting. And my body is 32 now, and I still love it, I’m still me—I’m that way, but different. That’s how I really felt about the vampires. And that’s also, like, when I think about the reality of living forever, if you stay the way you are, the world is gonna change, and you’re not gonna understand it. In smaller ways we get that with Boomers. The reality that you’re going to have to adapt, or you’re going to live in a world that you’re obsolete within, that is terrifying to you, and is unrecognizable, and what is the point of existing within this world? Unless you’re like Dracula sequestering yourself away from it.
Being able to have the humility to see that the world has gotten to a place that you had no hand in, that you’ve lost expertise within, I think that’s necessary for continued survival. That’s what I wanted to see with these vampires. How difficult is it to be an immortal being who always looks the same? How do you change? And how enticing change is—when your body can’t do it? Poppy has this fascination with getting a grey hair or getting a wrinkle, and knowing that time has been marked for her and Roisin together, and that her body has changed because they’ve been together. I think about people who get in relationships and gain weight because they’re eating food with somebody they love—and Poppy doesn’t get to have that. And some people hate that, like “Man this sucks, I’m not single-hot anymore!” But like, you’re a different type of hot. I think Poppy would fucking love that to gain weight because she and Roisin are making nice meals together.
LS: I loved the throughline of her trying to figure out ways to eat. That would be me.
SB: That would be me, too! Some vampires in some media can eat and it’s fine, but I really love what happens in What We Do in the Shadows when they eat. That was a direct pull, like, I had to steal that. [laughter]
LS: There’s no topping that. They did something perfect.
SB: I love those WWDITS vampires, though, because they are dealing with a world they don’t quite understand, and they’re disgusting, and they have sexuality like an immortal being would—they’ve done everything, twice, and they’ll do it again. I could talk about Nandor… forever. His incremental growth and then huuuge backslides. I think that’s the reality of it. If this book were 300 pages longer, there would be backsliding. That’s part of the trajectory, it’s not linear, it’s not constant growth.
LS: OK, and a cliché question: Would you do it? Would you be a vampire?
SB: There’s a part of me that’s like, “Nooo I’d like to die.” [laughter] but if… it would be terrifying to me, and I’d worry constantly that I’d have regrets, but I think I’d do it. Especially if Kelsey was doing it too.
LS: Awww.
SB: If my wife was gonna be a vampire I’d be a vampire.
LS: OK that’s awesome.
SB: But I would worry about food. I’d have to figure that one out.
LS: Yeah, I kinda feel like we have to crack that.
SB: But we’d need to experiment.
LS: Find a vampire that doesn’t mind maybe puking occasionally.
SB: They’ve done worse.
LS: “Try this! Today we’re going to Katz’s.”
SB: Blood and pastrami!
LS: I have a question I always ask writers, and I don’t know if I have my own answer: Was there a book that made you a reader, and was there a book that made you a writer? And are they different books?
SB: The Wizard of Oz, and then the REST of the Oz books, or The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. And you know, nothing magical or paranormal happens in that book—but everything is magical in that book. And, like, the cleverness of these kids, and the simple obvious choices they make, like standing on bathroom toilets so no one can see their feet, and sleeping in the beds, or course, and getting money from the fucking fountain, but also having them be like “Not too much money, OK we’ll just have enough to go to the automat, OK?” Definitely that made me a reader.
A writer? I couldn’t find a funny fantasy book about lesbians. And now, that funny fantasy book is obviously Gideon the Ninth—that is funny and fucked up… maybe we can say that that’s the book? But I was reading a lot of romances about gay men, and I was like… romances about lesbians exist, but they’re not funny. And that was in 2018, and now there are so many that are funny. And I bet there were some that were funny then—I just couldn’t find them! But I was like, “Fuck this! I’m gonna write funny lesbian fantasy romance!” and I kind of wrote out of spite.
The one thing that I really want to happen for me—I’ve had so much good fortune with this book, the Times review, and really fantastic readers. But I want fan art SO BAD. It feels so needy, but I’ve seen the good works you’ve all done for Gideon, I’ve seen all your space art—oh, you made her real buff, huh? [laughter] ummm, what if youuu… drew some vampires?
LS: They’re such good canvases! And I kinda got some Steven Universe influence? I think if you put Roisin and Pearl in a room together—I mean, the room might explode from anxiety.
SB: I made a video about this on TikTok. A lot of people don’t know how to pronounce Roisin’s name. I have a lot of reasons for naming her Roisin. I wanted to do a floral thing, because I wanted to emphasize that vampires are of this earth, they’re naturally occurring, but I also named her Roisin because Poppy was a little bit based on Roisin Conaty, who’s a British comedian. She was on the first season of Taskmaster, and a lot of the tasks are lateral thinking puzzles and Roisin Conaty does not think anything through before doing it. She just does it, and, it’s not a direct thing between her and Poppy—I think Roisin Conaty says No to a lot of stuff, and Poppy I think, would always say Yes. But I think it’s a fun exercise for writers: What would your character do if presented with this task? Would they jump right in, would they look around the room, would they think it through, would they fold under uncontrollable anxiety, would they try to trick Alex Horn into helping? I think Poppy would just not… think. And I think Taskmaster is a really fun place to go, like “My character is like that person.” So, that was a big influence for me: Taskmaster.
LS: I love that. Back in middle school, I read a book called The Silver Kiss, a pre-Twilight book about a teen girl falling in love with a vampire. Things don’t go well. But I still remember a scene where the vampire is trying to cross a creek, and steps into the water, and the water itself moves to flow around him, because he is, himself, unnatural, and the natural world doesn’t want to touch him. He’s suicidal for at least some of the book, because he hates being unnatural. But that’s the reason the book gives for why vampires burn—like, he can’t absorb the light of the sun, and it’s all these ways to show how out of joint he is. I was thinking about that while I was reading ALTD, because you make such a point that the vampires are in fact part of the natural world, and they’re arguing for that. Like, “We get to have lives too!”
SB: Yeah! Mutation is a feature not a bug. Mutation is evolution.
LS: Magneto was right.
SB: Yeah! It’s also like, if you’re doing vampirism as a metaphor for queerness, and I sort of was, but you never want to go too far in that, because vampires do drink peoples’ blood, and maybe that’s not cool, and I never want to put forward the idea that we’re predators.
LS: Yeah.
SB: But like this shame in being a creature on the outside, and feeling unnatural, and like an aberration, I really wanted to emphasize that, in this respect—as queer people are—these vampires are natural. They’re part of the ecosystem, they weren’t just dropped off here by ancient aliens… unless they were. But that’s somebody else’s book.
I’m writing some books now that I think are going to be set peripherally to this book.
You know how Anne Rice has some characters that pop over from Mayfair Witches, and I might have a little bit of crossover because it’s the same time period and there are… some other fun creatures.
LS: Yes! So, what’s next?
SB: I’m writing two things right now: one that’s loosely based on Blithe Spirit, there’s so much physical comedy that’s involved with ghosts. So, it’s this Victorian, Spiritualist, ghost, romance, lesbian, situation.
LS: Say more.
SB: Ideally it’s going to be part of a trilogy. I really want to do the old MGM monsters: Ghost, Werewolf, and I think for third one, a Selkie, because I’m too grossed out to do a Frankenstein’s Monster. But three queer women, in Victorian times, who are best friends, and it’s their three stories. In the first one, a spiritualist had a childhood friend, who was then her lover, who died. And she tries not to think about her for ten years, and now she’s 28, and suddenly, the friend is back! At first the woman’s like, “I’m going crazy, and I’m not going to pay attention to you”, and the ghost is like, “I will MAKE you pay attention to me”, and that’s where we get some ghost hijinks. And then the other thing I’m working on—
LS: Because one trilogy isn’t enough.
SB: —these two potentially apocryphal figures, from 19th Century New York, named Gallus Mag and Sadie the Goat. And Gallus Mag was this large-statured bouncer at a bar, and her deal was, when things got too rowdy, she would bite men’s ears off. And she had an ear jar, just like Spanish Jackie has a nose jar in Our Flag Means Death. And then Sadie the Goat, they called her that because she would headbutt people, and then her accomplices would steal their money. I’m basing characters off of them. But Sadie got into it with Gallus Mag, and Gallus Mag bit off her ear. Sadie then became a Hudson River pirate, she reunited with Gallus Mag, they made up, and Mag gave her her ear back and she wore it on a necklace for the rest of her life! And I thought: “What if they were in love?” Those are the two things.
Samara Breger is a writer and performer born and raised in New York City. In her previous life, she was an Emmy-nominated journalist and digital media producer, covering sexual and reproductive health. In addition to writing, she loves musical improv, opera, olympic weightlifting, and spending time with her wife and dog.
